I've been playing the Japanese release of Gran Turismo 3 on my PS2. What happens if I take my PS2 memory card, and use it with the American release of GT3?

The GT games use an arbitrary "Credits" as money, but they are clearly intended to mimic the local currency, e.g., a car that costs 20,000 credits in the American version costs 2,000,000 credits in the Japanese version, matching the dollar/yen exchange rate.

There are two parts to this, I guess:

Are PS2 memory cards region-locked when they're initialized, like the games, or will any card data work anywhere?

Do PS2 save-games use the same format for all regions (and then the particular game simply displays your money adjusted for the PS2's region's currency), or is "Japanese GT3" considered a different game than "American GT3" for the purposes of save-game files?

(I'm interested in the answer to this question for Okami, too, since the Japanese version of the game apparently doesn't have the "jukebox" feature for playing the soundtrack, and buying the official soundtrack -- if you can find one -- costs 10 times what the game does! So being able to use a Japanese Okami save-game with an American Okami would let me record the soundtrack for my iPod a lot more cheaply and easily.)

1 Answer
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I am not sure about memory cards being region locked, but I can tell you that for the most part, saved games are. Each game is given a unique ID and these vary for the same game between release regions and even just editions in some cases. It is this unique ID that the saved games are stamped with that associate them to that game. As far as one region game is consider, those saved files from another region are from a completely unrelated game.